Ok, so there’s the jewelry company, Ryan Porter, and they do custom jewelry, and I do love the “Harridan” necklace I ordered from them, so I ordered a Geek Girls Rule bracelet from them, just to give it away.

Basically, I’m gonna open this up here and on the public blog.

And I want to know, in what ways were your childhoods weird?

Let’s try to veer away from the traumatic stuff for this one.  Just things that you took for granted, and didn’t realize weren’t a thing until you’d interacted with other people a little more.

I talk about how my Dad was my entry to Geek.  He is a huge Star Trek fan.  I got him an NCC Enterprise baseball hat a few years ago, that he still wears to golf.  And he was delighted when I got him a signed Babylon Five script at a convention auction several years ago.

My Dad is also where I first learned about many weird conspiracy theories.

So many…

I did not realize until I was much older that having your 7-8 year old daughter read the collected prophecies of Edgar Cayce, Erich von Daniken’s Chariots of the Gods and Gods from Outer Space, and the entire series of books on the Lost Continent of Mu (the Pacific Ocean analog to Atlantis for those of you who did not grow up with conspiracy-minded dads) was a little weird.

As was quizzing her on them after.

Granted that may just have been him being eager to have someone to discuss them with  pre-internet.  He did the same thing with the Sherlock Holmes stories.

Thanks to both of my parents I also read a lot of books on cryptozoology, the supernatural, reincarnation (largely divorced from Buddhism), and the occult.

And my mother had the nerve to act surprised when I became a Wiccan.

I know where my Dad got it.  A buddy of my grandfather’s had been a pilot in WWII, and had continued to fly in whatever the 50s equivalent of the Air National Guard was.  He had been on a routine flight over Lake Superior on a clear day and saw something, lost a lot of time, then came back still over the lake quite awhile after he should have been out of fuel. He came over to talk to my Grandpa super shook up, my Dad was hiding on the stairs or something, and shortly after that several military men came to talk to Grandpa’s friend, and it was never mentioned again.  I think Dad said he’d been accused of landing the plane in Canada for nefarious (?) purposes.  But Dad said he looked and sounded terrified when he talked about seeing a light and some other craft, and then suddenly it was much, much later than it should have been.

Dad told me this story when I was a kid, and just before giving me Chariots of the Gods.  There was another book he gave me that had a white cover with a very pastoral scene on it that he was really keen on but that I cannot remember the title of.  I can’t remember if that one was about ufos or Stonehenge, or both.

My father’s weirdness knows few bounds.

Now that I’m older I can see Von Daniken’s theories about the pyramids for what they are, racist refusal to believe that black people could have built them.

But every once in a while I’m shaken a little when I realize that something that I took as fact or common knowledge is not either of those things.

Like the existence of Mu.

That’s just what they want you to believe.

Yeah, we’ve had those talks.

We don’t talk much anymore.  He’s gotten more conservative as he’s gotten older, and into weirder and weirder conspiracy theories.

And I’ve gotten more liberal, nay, radically lefty, and while I enjoy reading up on them, the conspiracy theories I give credence to have become few and far between.

Ok, this isn’t a thing I have ever believed, but both my father and father in law believe that the Safeway card is just a way to track your spending and sell it to your health insurance company so they can charge you more for eating like shit.

sigh

Yeah.

I spend a lot of time looking like the eyeroll emoji.

A lot.

Anyway, if you feel up to it, let me know the myriad weirdnesses of your childhoods and I’ll figure out a way to decide who gets the bracelet.

If you like what you read here, or want to help fund my nerdy jewelry habit, please consider donating using the link at the top right of the page:  Keep Us Geeking, or checking out my Patreon.  Thank you!

Also, if you’d like to see what sort of fiction I write when left to my own devices, please feel free to check out my fiction Patreon, Nothing Nice Comes Out of My Head.